This week’s press conference showdown between presidential candidate Donald Trump and Univision’s Jorge Ramos was another farce. Such melodrama drives today’s pathetic journalism, with journalists driving Trump’s campaign, and vice versa. The forged, artificial bond between superficial media and superficial political candidates self-perpetuates.
This circus-like cycle will not have a happy ending. Clownish Trump, whose politically incorrect way of speaking and uninspired opponents, more than his ideas, aid his rising fanbase, is the GOP’s 2016 presidential front-runner. The cycle spins out of control with serious consequences.
This week’s spectacle was purely a ploy by Ramos, who is one of those grandstanding television personalities like Megyn Kelly, for instant media attention. He disrupted and hijacked a Trump press affair, was booted from the event, returned and continued his tirade. His purpose was not to report, inquire or debate, let alone inform, enrich or enlighten. His aim, like most people on today’s non-fictional television, was to get attention for the sake of getting attention.
I expect this hitching onto Trump’s populist bandwagon to spread. Fox News, which is built on an anti-intellectual premise, mainstreamed the trend years ago, cleverly marketing its brand of opportunistic sensationalism as an alternative to “the mainstream media”, an industry which now adopts a similarly salacious approach. Look no further than Fox News at Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich or any other TV pundit-politician-populist dealing in bromides, not principles, like Andy Griffith’s power-lusting Lonesome Rhodes in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd. But look, too, for variations of the same, shallow approach across today’s click-baiting media. This week, NBC’s veteran Today Show host, vacuous Matt Lauer, asked Donald Trump, who may be America’s top leader when America’s worst enemy gets nuclear weapons, if he has a crush on Megyn Kelly.
It is a full circle moment in today’s government/media circus; an icon of the empty-headed media elite both aping and ceding his scant credibility to one of the more vacant media figures, Megyn Kelly, an intelligent journalist who can be constructive but never goes deep for long and deliberately dumbs herself down to get attention.
The Kelly File hostess initiated the emergence of circus ringmaster Trump, one of the 20th century’s most symbolic figures of the status quo’s cronyism and pragmatism, as a serious candidate for the White House. Kelly’s controversial debate questions for Trump, who continues to gain followers chiefly because he is wrongly perceived as not being part of the status quo, were improper for a presidential debate. Despite Roger Ailes standing by his network’s lead hostess in a statement, and Trump’s vulgar and obnoxious Tweets, retweets, and ramblings, Megyn Kelly was wrong to use Trump’s TV barbs as cannon fodder in Fox’s thinly veiled attack on Trump’s character. Kelly was wrong to ask the candidates whether they heard a supernatural voice. She was wrong to minimize serious policy during the Fox News/Facebook debate (read my review here). Mr. Ailes is wrong that Kelly is a serious journalist; she’s capable of being serious only in fits which is why her dedication to being unserious makes her among the worst of today’s journalists, as I wrote when she debuted with her own show in 2013 (read my review and postscript here). MSNBC’s Chris Matthews observed about her the other night on Hardball that Megyn Kelly has a knack for making an audience interested in her reaction to a guest as he’s speaking. I think this is what fuels her appeal; she plays hard and smart with a wink. But she plays. She’s a put-on artist.
In short, Megyn Kelly is to journalism what Donald Trump is to politics—with Jorge Ramos tagging along—and nothing more: stubbornly, consistently and cockily anti-intellectual. There’s a reason why Trump and Kelly propel each other’s cause; they’re like a nightly show. They both represent an improper mixing of state with economics and show business with journalism. They both embody the person without principles—or, more precisely, the person who has contempt for acting on principle.
This quality attracts people with mixed, bad or worst principles. In fact, the prospect of a President Trump rounding illegal immigrants up based on who the state deems good or bad, and getting mileage out of Trump messing with the left’s new media darling who’s willing to say or do anything for an audience, appeals to former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke. Racist and convicted felon Duke all but endorsed Trump this week as the best candidate for president. That the former Democrat and former Republican legislator, who reflects the worst of both parties, sees Trump’s and Kelly’s pseudo-spat as an opportunity shows that those willing to say and do anything for attention propagate those willing to do anything terrible with the government.
The alternative to this 2016 presidential campaign madness is not the same status quo leadership. The worst outcome for America is more of the failed Clinton-Bush leadership, which spawned Obama and the current band of charlatans. Jeb Bush, for example, rushed to defend Jorge Ramos versus Trump, offering that he thinks Ramos deserves respect. Ramos, like Kelly, Trump and other players, deserves scorn, not respect, for grandstanding and Bush represents the failed past. The new century’s new media, as I wrote here, demands constant and serious judgment. Today’s rational American should beware, because the government crony-media axis spin, to flip a Fox News catchphrase, starts here and now. The circus has just begun.